“The circus is both a home and a cage.”

This phrase sits at the emotional and philosophical heart of Sorry Entertainer, a collage series composed of reimagined archival imagery of historic circus figures—clowns, oddities, acrobats, strongmen, bearded ladies, lion tamers, and nameless performers. These subjects are pulled from the forgotten margins of early modern spectacle and recast in layers of visual fragmentation: blurred colors, fractured forms, half-smiles. The images are not clean. They are not comfortable. Like the performers they depict, they resist full legibility.

Drawing on the anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, Sorry Entertainer frames the circus figure as a permanently transitional being. Turner wrote of liminal individuals—those undergoing rites of passage—as "betwixt and between," no longer who they were, not yet who they are to become. But for the circus performer, liminality becomes permanent. Their performance is not a stage in a larger ritual of transformation—it is the ritual. It is their identity.

In this way, the circus does not merely reflect the liminal—it manufactures it. It stages the strange, the grotesque, the exceptional. It elevates the abnormal into spectacle, and in doing so, reinforces the boundaries of the “normal.” The bearded lady, the sword swallower, the human cannonball—they are invited into the public gaze only as long as they remain strange. Acceptance is conditional, provisional. They are included precisely because they are excluded. Their spectacle reaffirms society’s margins while profiting from their transgression.

Sorry Entertainer is obsessed with this contradiction: the performer who must be seen to survive, but who is never fully permitted to be seen as human. The liminal, in this sense, becomes a trap. These figures are not only between social categories—they are held there, suspended in symbolic contradiction. In the collages, this is rendered through aesthetic dislocation—faces partially obscured, bodies doubled or elongated, props exaggerated or surreal. They are uncanny: present and not present, real and not real.

The series takes its name from a song by Daniel Johnston—an artist whose own life was marked by the dissonance between performance and pathology, between being celebrated and being misunderstood. “Sorry Entertainer” captures the dual nature of the circus artist: a figure at once central to public entertainment and peripheral to social belonging.

Where Turner brings us to the borderlands of ritual and identity, Bruce Lincoln leads us into the politics of that border. In his writing on stigma, power, and religion, Lincoln explores how those marked as “other” are not merely outliers—they are instrumental to the construction of order. The stigmatized are often necessary to reinforce the norms of a dominant group. Their marginality is curated. It is strategic.

The circus, then, becomes a symbolic theater of this logic. Its cast is curated not merely for entertainment but for what it signifies. The “freak” becomes a living boundary marker—a sign of what one is not supposed to be. The strongman represents hypermasculinity; the contortionist, pliable femininity; the clown, emotional contradiction. Every character becomes an exaggerated metaphor for social roles and taboos.

In Sorry Entertainer, this metaphorical weight is literalized in the collaged imagery. The subjects are not simply shown—they are displayed, fragmented, manipulated. Their context is unclear. Some float in pale voids; others are trapped in layered, chaotic backdrops. The result is discomforting: the viewer becomes the voyeur, the one who gazes. In this way, the series implicates the audience. It asks: What are you seeing? What are you being shown? Who gave you permission to look?

This reflexivity is central to Lincoln’s view of ritual power. The power of the spectacle is not just in its performance—but in its ability to construct and police the gaze itself. The circus doesn’t just show us something strange—it teaches us how to look at it, how to interpret it, how to position ourselves in relation to it. The act of viewing becomes a mechanism of control.

While the early circus is an historical point of departure, the critique in Sorry Entertainer is timeless. The series is ultimately about spectacle as survival, and what it means to live within a system that only rewards visibility on the condition that it can consume you.

The performer in this work is not merely a historical figure—they are a metaphor for the artist, the gig worker, the social media persona, the refugee, the outcast, the visible “other.” To be seen is not the same as to be understood. In our image-saturated world, visibility is currency. But it is also risk. It invites consumption, fetishization, dismissal. It flattens nuance.

This dynamic is central to the politics of marginality. The figures in Sorry Entertainer are both overexposed and unseen. Their presentation is exaggerated, almost grotesque—but their humanity is elusive, hidden in plain sight. In some images, a clown smiles through a collapsed tent; in others, a lion tamer’s whip is turned against themselves. Humor turns tragic. Pride becomes vulnerability. The “act” is not just performance—it is armor. A survival strategy.

In many ways, the circus is a mythic space. It exists outside the normal rhythm of life. It arrives, dazzles, and disappears. Its internal logic is its own. This mythologizing is both romantic and violent. The circus becomes a site of projection: of dreams, fears, fantasies. But for the performer, this is not mythology—it is labor. It is embodiment. It is a life lived under lights that burn too hot and never stay lit for long.

This mythology is interrogated in Sorry Entertainer by mixing the fantastical with the mundane. There are images of trapeze artists suspended in impossible positions—overlaid with gray skies, or bureaucratic architectural lines. The pageantry of performance is set against the starkness of real life. The juxtaposition reveals the cracks in the myth. It reminds us that the circus, like society, is built on stories—many of them false, most of them incomplete.

There is a melancholic undertone throughout Sorry Entertainer. These are not just depictions—they are resurrections. The figures come from long-forgotten postcards, newspaper clippings, and playbills. Their names are often lost. Their lives undocumented. Their dignity, questionable. By collaging them into new forms, the work attempts to restore something—if not their truth, then at least their presence. But even this restoration is fraught. What does it mean to give voice to the voiceless through new layers of representation? Is it tribute, or appropriation? Reverence, or manipulation?

This tension is unresolved in the work—and intentionally so. The process of collage becomes a metaphor for memory itself: layered, fractured, uncertain. The past is never static. It is always being reassembled through the lens of the present. These works are not nostalgic. They are haunted. Haunted by what was done to these people. Haunted by what they endured. Haunted by the fact that their exploitation is mirrored—albeit in new forms—in the present.

A recurring motif in the series is the clown. Not the sanitized children’s entertainer, but the grotesque figure of contradiction. The clown is an archetype of emotional paradox: joy and sorrow, innocence and menace, comedy and despair. In Sorry Entertainer, the clown is reimagined as a figure of resistance. Not through confrontation, but through ambiguity. The clown refuses clarity. They remain unreadable. In a world obsessed with visibility and categorization, this refusal becomes radical.

The clown is also a trickster, a liminal entity in mythology and folklore—disruptive, destabilizing. In this role, the clown becomes a guide through the labyrinth of meaning-making. They hold up a mirror not only to society, but to the viewer. They laugh—but at what? At us? At themselves? At the absurdity of it all?

This ambiguity is central to the series’ ethos. Sorry Entertainer is not about answers. It is about discomfort, confrontation, and reflection. It does not offer closure. It offers an opening.

Collage is the medium through which these tensions are visualized. As a practice, collage is inherently fragmentary. It resists wholeness. It works with what is discarded, dismembered, out of place. This makes it the perfect vehicle for a series concerned with marginality, distortion, and paradox.

The act of cutting, layering, and recombining is not merely aesthetic—it is political. It refuses linearity. It creates new contexts, new readings. It challenges the viewer to hold multiple meanings at once. In Sorry Entertainer, this method becomes a metaphor for the fractured lives and identities of its subjects. Just as they were pieced together in the public imagination—as “types,” as “acts”—so too are they pieced together here. But in this reassembly, something is revealed. A new story emerges—not of coherence, but of complexity.

Sorry Entertainer is a meditation on what it means to exist on the margins of visibility and belonging. It is about those who have been watched but not witnessed, known but never understood. It is about the performers who gave everything for a moment in the spotlight—and what that spotlight exposed, and what it obscured.

It is also about the systems that persist: the economies of spectacle, the politics of exclusion, the architecture of gaze. These are not relics of a bygone era. They are alive and well, repackaged for modern consumption.

To engage with this series is to engage with the discomfort of that reality. It is to look, and to ask oneself: Am I witnessing? Or am I watching? Am I complicit? Or am I complicit in pretending I’m not?

The circus may have packed up its tent. But the performance continues. And so do the contradictions.